BMW e-ink paint job
BMW demoed a black and white e-ink paneled body at CES in 2022.
In 2023, they upped the game by creating a colored e-ink version:
Riven’s holographic imager
Riumplus was inspired by the imagers in the game Riven (the sequel to Myst) to create his own working andotrope for Mysterium 2023.
Here’s the imager from the game:
And here’s his version:
It works by rotating two tablet/phone inside a cylinder that has slits cut in it so you only see the faces of the tablet directly facing you. He has a great writeup on how he created the device, filed a patent for it, and as has a video:
Workshop Nation robot
I like his thinking: we already have enough computers – what we need is more personality. Where are the kind of robots we saw as kids? C3PO, R2D2, the robot from Lost in Space. So, he hacked an Alexa into an old TV with a set of eyes and gives his robot a little of the personality he was looking for.
The Invisible PC
Basically Homeless decided he wanted to make an invisible PC. What? He tried using a variety of different off-the-shelf technology so that he has just a empty desk with a piece of nano-particle film that has the desktop projected on by a digital projector.
Parts list:
- Invisible gaming mouse that uses a depth sensing Intel RealSense 435i to translate my hand and finger movements into cursor actions in windows.
- The keyboard is flush mounted with the desk surface and has a plastic mold that perfectly fills the space between the keys, and then is painted.
- The monitor uses a nano particle film suspended from the ceiling with a projector pointed at it to appear as though it’s a floating hologram.
- The whole assembly is wireless, see 10:22
There’s a lot of small details, so it’s worth the watch.
AI textures entire 3D scene
Dream Textures add-on for Blender by Carson Katri uses stable diffusion to generate textures for a scene. Below is an example based on the prompt “sci-fi abandoned buildings”. The AI-generated results aren’t always perfect, but the process is pretty amazing. Not to mention amazingly fast compared to creating from scratch.
Space and beyond
Choose Your Own Adventure books – a staple of every 80’s kid’s collection. I loved these books and they definitely got me reading more – but even as a kid I could tell they weren’t the best written things. Seemingly intelligent choices would get you killed while running off against your parents wishes on the family boat across a lake during a thunderstorm would lead to high adventure.
One thing I did love, however, was the amazing illustrations in some of the books. Paul Granger’s illustrations were some of my favorites. Space And Beyond was definitely one of those books where the writing was pretty sub-par, but the pictures were fascinating to me as a kid. I remember trying to copy the ships and make my own – to reasonably good effect on the side of my notebooks and test papers.
Over time as I was exposed to more sci-fi art; and started seeing some similarities between Space and Beyond and other work. I wonder if Paul Granger got some of his inspiration from John Berkey. John Berkey was a fabulous sci-fi artist that created many futuristic works in the 70’s – including one of the most iconic Star Wars posters of the era.
Do you think these were ‘heavily inspired’? 🙂
Modern movies are confusing
As a movie lover, I’ve been unhappy with lots of modern movies. I’ve had a hard time putting my finger on it. But one of the things I’ve noticed since going back to watch some of my older favorites is how ‘clean’ and clear the action is. We can talk about the horrors of shakycam and increasingly schizophrenic cut lengths, but the poor quality of modern blocking and staging appears to be one of the major reasons things are less clear.
When you go back and look at Spielberg’s handling of framing, you start realizing why a lot of modern framing and blocking creates more confusion rather than helping be part of the exposition itself. CinemaStix does a great job showing how expertly Spielberg accomplishes this – and why he’s probably the greatest master of these techniques. He even mentions the Steven Soderbergh re-work of Raiders of the Lost Ark with different music/etc.
Non-Euclidean rendering
M.C. Escher was famous for his wonderful mind-bending images. I loved his drawings as a kid because it created a sense of wonder, playfulness, and unlocked interesting new viewpoints and possibilities simply by violating a single physical or geometric expectation.
We’re used to the world following rules. If we leave a room, we would expect to go back into that same room if we opened the door. But in rendered scenes, none of those rules needs to be followed. We can actually make M.C. Escher like worlds a reality. But how – and more importantly – how could we use them to make an interesting gaming experience?
CodeParade walks us through many interesting effects that can be created using some simple non-Euclidian rendering and movement techniques.
As it turns out – games have been doing this for a little while. One of the first examples of slightly violating the rules of Euclidean space was the use of portals in the mega-hit game Portal (well, Narbacular Drop if you want to get technical). I say slightly because Portal actually does a very good job trying to maintain the physical properties of size, gravity, momentum, and physics of our everyday world when interacting with the portal. But, there are still problems like when you try to pass a portal into itself… or if you start messing with momentum…or if you start sandwiching the portals, etc.
Others started really twisting other rules of Euclidean space and exploring the results. Non-Euclidean spaces seemed ripe to create innovative and interesting puzzle games. I remember seeing early drops of Antichamber and being really fascinated by the simple, yet mind bending puzzles. As Digidigger explains, these tricks are accomplished with a combination of teleportation, creative use of the stencil buffers, and so forth.
Other games quickly followed like Manifold Garden that added the concept of infinite world wrap-around. Hyperbolica uses hyperbolic projection mapping. Then there were forced perspective games like Superliminal. As we quickly see, there is more than one rule to break in Euclidian space.
More recently and to greater effect – non-Euclidean tricks are being used in horror games. The experience of the world shifting around you definitely can create a very unsettling emotional response. Paintings that become doorways, rooms that change when you look away. Whole games have become based on these simple effects. Non-Euclidean techniques are here to stay. The real question is, how will we think of using them next?
Learning more:
Issues Valve ran into when making the game Portal:
How to create portals and solving the most common perspective, distance, scaling, collision detection, and physics issues you’ll encounter:
Hyperbolica devlog (13 video playlist):
Secrets behind how P.T. works. There’s also some pretty awesome exploration and disassembly by Lance McDonald.
GPU Shader art
Kishimisu walks you through the fascinating realm of writing programmable shader art and offers helpful insights and guidance to assist you to make your own creations.
Here we go – AI reimagines Aliens as a Wes Anderson movie
AI Fungi used generative AI technology to simulate what a Wes Anderson’s version of the classic sci-fi/horror flick Aliens might look like. He injects Tilda Swinton in the role of Ripley as well as some other recognizable regulars on Anderson’s movies and the Nostromo getting a colorful upgrade.
Yes, AI can do this today. Imagine in a few years from now…